J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the nation’s largest bank, whose chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has lead Wall Street’s war against regulation, announced Thursday it had lost $2 billion in trades over the past six weeks and could face an additional $1 billion of losses, due to excessively risky bets.

Ever since the start of the banking crisis in 2008, Dimon has been arguing that more government regulation of Wall Street is unnecessary. Since then, J.P. Morgan’s lobbyists and lawyers have done everything in their power to eviscerate the Volcker rule ...

What just happened at J.P. Morgan – along with its leader’s cavalier dismissal followed by lame reassurance – reveals how fragile and opaque the banking system continues to be, why Glass-Steagall must be resurrected, and why the Dallas Fed’s recent recommendation that Wall Street’s giant banks be broken up should be heeded.

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That is why J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and chief executive, Jamie Dimon, should not be allowed to have access to savings and loan banks and have no say in how they are to be regulated. Every homeowner who holds a mortgage that is underwater needs to coalesce and seek your common interests. The middle class USA citizens needs to stand tall and firm on this issue, make a lot of noise if necessary, boycott, march, sit-in, and whatever it takes to make our government put limits on what can and cannot be done with this important banking system. If some want to speculate and take risks, form another system of casino, speculative banking and let them have at it with no guarantees from taxpayer money. As long as their banks have guarantees, they do not take the risks, they dump the risk on taxpayers and get away with it.

"The proposition is simple: Too-big-to-fail banks should be made smaller, and preferably small enough to fail without causing global panic. This idea had been gathering momentum since the fall of 2008 and, while the Brown-Kaufman amendment originated on the Democratic side, support was beginning to appear across the aisle."

"Another financial crisis, a prolonged recession, or changing political ideologies could cause a re-examination of the status quo and lead to a decision to break up the big banks."

~ Roberta Karmel, a onetime Securities and Exchange Commissioner

"J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the nation's largest bank, whose chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has lead Wall Street's war against regulation ... said, 'The bets were "poorly executed" and "poorly monitored," "a result of many errors," "sloppiness," and "bad judgment." But not to worry. "We will admit it, we will fix it and move on."

As long as banks are allowed to lend money that they don't actually have in their vaults (they create it "out of the inkwell"...which is what caused the bank failures of the 1930s), we are all in deep doo-doo. The only entity that should be allowed to create fiat money is the government itself.

I just finished re-reading Robert A. Heinlein's novel, For Us, the Living. It isn't much of a novel, it's more of a lecture disguised as fiction. It was his first, written in 1939, and never published until after his death, but it has some interesting economic ideas. Some seem way off base, but others will make you pause and think. (ONE bank...The Bank of the United States, owned and operated by and for We the People...sounds communistic, doesn't it? But why should Wall Street get to make the rules?) Of course the financial lobbyists would die before allowing any of his suggestions to be enacted.

People have been screaming about the rise in gasoline prices for months...there is NO shortage of gasoline or crude oil (although we should be weaning ourselves off that ASAP); it's all due to commodity speculators. Something needs to be done about that...maybe before people start building homemade Guillotines.

"The truth is that there are no good banks and bad banks among the giants of finance.That’s just a feel-good story that gives us false hope that individuals and individual institutions can fix a system that is rotten to the core."

I absolutely love Sen. Bernie Sanders! (but I don't know if this video will play....)

I wanted to make sure that you saw Bernie’s CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer this week talking about Wall Street and the need to break up the huge financial institutions that dominate our economy. Here’s an excerpt:

Click here to watch Bernie on CNN's The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer

Bernie believes that at a time when the six largest financial institutions have assets worth $9 trillion, which is the equivalent of two-thirds of the GDP of the United States, and when the top six banks provide half of the mortgages in America and over two-thirds of the credit cards, it is clearly time to break them up.

Adding insult to injury, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase who recently presided over a $2 billion “goof," sits on the Board of the New York Federal Reserve, which is charged with regulating the banks. Bernie will be introducing legislation next week to end this “fox guarding the hen house” situation.

Just wanted to keep you up to date on Bernie’s work taking on Wall Street.